In 1895, the eccentric businessman Henry Gaylord Wilshire began developing a luxury residential community on what was then the western edge of Los Angeles. During that time, he cut a strip of land running four blocks down the middle of the subdivision and donated it to the city for a grand boulevard. But his gift had two conditions. The first was that the road be named for him. The second was that rail lines be banned from the thoroughfare. The city agreed to his terms, wrote them into municipal code, and L.A.’s most important boulevard was born.
Today, Wilshire Boulevard runs nearly 16 miles from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean, and is also the most direct route through Los Angeles’s core to various business districts, schools, and cultural institutions. These commuter patterns mean that every weekday, for three hours in the morning and another three hours in the evening, Los Angeles is choked by gridlock. Henry Wilshire’s agreement with the city presaged a long struggle to build the system’s central artery, the D Line. But now the wait is over. The first part of the D Line extension is open, with the full nine-mile extension scheduled to be completed by fall of 2027—just in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics. Read more about the other factors that could impede Angelenos from using public transportation: www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/is-los-ang...